Damian Cugley’s Weblog
As mentioned earlier, I am working on a version of the Picky Picky Game that does not need to write to files (since some web servers will be set up that way for security reasons). In some ways this simplifies things, because it means there is only one URL hierarchy to worry about.
The URL design now looks like this:
picky.cgi/sample/ |
GET | Home page, dynamically generated |
picky.cgi/sample/main.css |
GET | Style sheets and other static files |
picky.cgi/sample/13/foo.png |
GET | One of the candidates in the 13th panel |
picky.cgi/sample/13/votes |
POST | Ballot box for panel 13 |
picky.cgi/sample/14/pictures |
POST | Where to post candidates for panel 14 |
Previously only the POST URLs used the CGI script;
all the static resources came from files and had a separate URL
hierarchy.
The dynamically generated resources that previously were stored
on disc can now instead be stored in the object database that
holds the other metadata. This means the host web server
(Apache) is no longer responsible for such details as
Content-Length headers or handling
If-Modified-Since, and I need to implement
them. So far I am halfway done.
For some reason, pictures stored on disc (what I could now
call ‘legacy’ resources) are not being served
properly; I will look in to that when I next have some
spare time. In the meantime, you can try out the fairly
broken-looking prototype at http://caption.org/caption-cgi/hello.cgi/sample/.